Chicago's apartment boom needs more top-shelf architecture

This is a tale of two new West Loop high-rises and what they say about Chicago's apartment building boom, which has restored construction cranes to the skyline but has yet to give us architecture with a capital "A."

The buildings — the underwhelming Arkadia Tower in Greektown and the better-than-average JeffJack Apartments west of Union Station — are the latest products of the construction surge, which is expected to deliver nearly 3,000 apartments to downtown Chicago this year and almost 5,000 next year.

Both cater to a new wave of downtown residents, among them tech workers and millennials who don't want to be tied down to a mortgage..Both are stocked with amenities, from swimming pools to party rooms, that elevate them to a level of quality once reserved for condominiums.

Both reflect downtown's rising attractiveness as a place to live, a telltale sign of which is people walking dogs on Loop sidewalks. Both mean more people walking, taking public transit or biking to work, saving energy. Both occupy former surface parking lots, promising new tax revenues to a city sorely in need of cash.

But there's more to the story than these broad trend lines. These buildings ought to be assessed as much for their public presence as for the private amenities they provide residents. And that's what separates them.

Arkadia Tower

Few new apartment buildings have such a prominent site as this 33-story high-rise sandwiched between Halsted Street's charming restaurant row and the harsh highway trench that connects the Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways. Unfortunately, Arkadia Tower, at 765 W. Adams St., doesn't seize the opportunity.

Shaped by Steven McFadden of Chicago's FitzGerald Associates Architects for White Oak Realty Partners of Chicago, the $105 million, 350-unit project is only a slight improvement on the tired, city-dulling formula of a slab tower stacked atop a parking garage.

Here, at least, effort and expense have gone into enlivening the four-level garage, which is also available to nonresidents and provides much-needed parking for Greektown.

A perforated metal skin transforms the garage into a kind of a signboard for the area, displaying kitschy images of marathon runners along the expressway and a surprisingly winning rendition of the Parthenon along Halsted. The tower itself, a mix of blue-tinted glass and white-painted concrete, offers a facile echo of the Greek flag's colors.

What's next? Green, white and red high-rises in Little Italy?

City officials were right to insist that Arkadia be pushed back from human-scaled Halsted, preventing a canyon effect. Yet only when tenants occupy now-empty ground-floor retail space will the building's full impact on the streetscape become clear.

Already, it's evident that the tower makes a pallid, plain vanilla skyline statement. Its meekness is underscored by the gusto of the nearby Skybridge at 1 N. Halsted, a twin-towered high-rise with a bridgelike structure topping its dramatic, see-through voids.

While McFadden deserves credit for lightening Arkadia's mass with a blue-glass slab, the overall effect is competent rather than inspired. The same applies to the apartments, which range from studios to three-bedrooms. FitzGerald's planned One South Halsted apartment tower, which will have a boldly curving glass exterior, promises to have a far more potent presence — a worthy neighbor for Skybridge.

JeffJack Apartments

With a trying-hard-to-be-hip name that alludes to its location at the corner of Jefferson Street and Jackson Boulevard, this just-opened, 15-story apartment building at 601 W. Jackson brings a mostly pleasing jolt of modernity to the West Loop's cluster of old manufacturing lofts.

Chicago architect Thomas Roszak, one of the investors in the 190-unit, $53 million building, once worked for the successful Glencoe architect-developer David Hovey. Hovey's influence is apparent in JeffJack's clean-line modernism and flecks of bright color. But Roszak has found his own voice, a confidence affirmed by a national interior architecture award he won in 2008 for a glass house he designed for his family.

His JeffJack is deliberately two-faced: A handsomely proportioned glass wall lines Jackson, turning the corner before giving way to exposed concrete walls and large windows on Jefferson.

While the concrete is monotonous, lacking the delightful decoration of nearby lofts or the residential quirkiness of the transit-oriented apartment high-rise at 1611 W. Division, the view along Jackson is of an elegantly narrow slab of glass, accented by green fins.

In another plus, Roszak integrated the building's three levels of parking into the design, avoiding the tower stacked atop a parking garage syndrome that afflicts Arkadia. Stiltlike columns further lighten the building's presence along Jackson.

The interior, where apartments range from studios to two-bedrooms, is spare but well-handled. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows provide close-up "peekaboo" views of surrounding buildings, compensating for the lack of jaw-dropping panoramas offered at Arkadia. Amenities are bunched on the 15th floor, giving residents a taste of the high life.

There are some good strokes here, but architects and developers need to do better. As the apartment boom proceeds, with new high-rises under construction at such showcase sites as Block 37 and Wolf Point, the urban design stakes — and the need for grade-A architecture — will only keep rising.